Who governs?’ Civil servants in Hungary (2010-2022)

Elite studies often focus on ‘real’ politicians, such as party leaders, prime ministers, or ministers. Although civil servants play an important role in the implementation of public policies, they are theoretically not politicians according to the expectation of Max Weber’s theory that bureaucrats should be neutral. In practice, however, the members of the top bureaucracy work at the center of political decision-making being involved not only in the implementation but also in the preparatory procedures of government decisions in practice. In recent decades, the politicization of civil servants has been one of the highlighted research topics, but we know less about their socio-demographic profiles and careers in different countries. The aim of this paper is to present the Hungarian case by studying the permanent and deputy permanent state secretaries of ministries: who are and who were the members of the top civil servants; what is and what was their socio-economic status; what can we know about their career paths into the bureaucracy in different periods after the regime change. The results come from a database that contains socio-demographic and career data about all members of Hungarian cabinets including political and bureaucratic leaders from 1990 to 2022. The database is suitable for comparing cabinets over a long time period.